Well, if you want to get noticed use a headline like that.
Just a word of caution to everybody – Biden has NOT been elected as president. The electoral college does that, and that does not meet till mid-December. Not all of them will vote along party lines. In addition there are still votes to count, and in some areas the last votes to be counted as overseas military – who might just be Trump supporters. The fat lady has not sung, but she is warming her voice.
The second largest number of votes for a candidate went to Donald Trump. He got massive support. We need to ask why.
In 2016 I did a road trip around the USA. I met a lot of people and watched local TV. There were so many people suffering real hardship I started to see that people were desperate for somebody to save them – and Donald Trump was offering that. I was fairly convinced by the end of the trip that he would be elected.
But why were people suffering – Obama was a great man? This week I heard Bernie Sander’s brother dump on Obama for not helping so many people that needed him and supported him. I don’t know if that was true, but for some time I have been saying the biggest gun-crime issue in the USA is suicide. On that road trip I met two people that had seen people shoot themselves.
One of the challenges to the BLM movement I would make is that it might be more accurate to say Poor Lives Matter, because that is the demographic that seems to suffer most. During the Obama reign the inequality in the USA did not change much. During the Trump reign there were economic benefits for black men.
There is another aspect of Trump that struck me. He made promises in his campaign, and he stuck with them. Okay, the wall was a bit of a failure in respect of delivery (and I would question whether it would be effective). But he promised he would build a wall and he started to build a wall. There was an aspect of “I said I would do this and I will do it”. You might hate the policies, but the idea of somebody in politics saying they will do what they promised is pretty normal.
To me these are the two areas that stood out – he did actually improve the lot of some poorer middle class groups, and he did what he said despite people trying to stop him.
Both of these factors are important to a lot of people. How many of our political parties offer them?